A Framework for Application Settings

It is a very common practice to store settings in config keys within the AppSettings section of an App.config file. These settings then need to be read and converted to the appropriate type. One must also take care to cater for situations where the key is not found, or the value is invalid. This article provides a structured approach to this practice. Feel free to review and use the accompanying source code.

Update 2015-02-28: I made a minor improvement to ReadAsync() suggested by Stephen Cleary, who I thank for the code review.

Update 2015-03-03: Some people have asked why we actually need AppSettings any more, given that there are alternatives such as .NET Settings or custom configuration sections. They are correct. However I still see a lot of projects using AppSettings, and this article is intended to provide a better way to deal with those AppSettings.

Update 2015-11-12: If you want to use this in your own code, check out my .NET Settings Framework project which is based on this article and provides NuGet packages that you can just drop into your projects.

The Problem

I’ve seen a lot of production code that reads values from config keys in App.config that looks something like this:

// set a default, just in case the key is not found or the conversion fails
int timeout = 3000;
// retrieve the value for the desired key
string timeoutStr = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["timeoutInMilliseconds"];
// check whether the key was actually found; if not, the default value is retained
if (timeoutStr != null)
{
// attempt to convert to the desired type
// -> if it succeeds, the default value is replaced with the retrieved value
// -> if it fails, the default value is retained
bool converted = int.TryParse(timeoutStr, out timeout);
}

Aside from the bloat due to comments and braces (which were both necessary to make this example clear), you can see that we essentially have four lines of code just to read an integer setting from App.config.

What’s really bad is that there will essentially be four lines of code for every setting, all doing essentially the same thing for different settings. That isn’t very DRY.

A Basic Solution

One of my earlier attempts at solving this problem involved a utility class which took care of reading the settings and converting them to the appropriate type, using a specific method per type:

The only problem with this class is that while removes the bloat and duplication from the actual logic, it is full of duplication itself: you need a method per type to perform the type-specific conversion.

Dependency injection

In order to unit test our ConfigKey class, it’s best if we abstract out the dependency on App.config. In particular, we want to separate the part that reads the settings (reader) from the part that does the conversion and returns the value (provider).

For this, we need two interfaces. First, IConfigKeyReader is responsible to read the value of a setting from a source (e.g. App.config):

public interface IConfigKeyReader
{
string Read(string key);
}

Secondly, IConfigKeyProvider does all the rest: given a key, it returns a value (by internally using the IConfigKeyReader, which is not immediately evident from the interface):

The IConfigKeyProvider for App.config settings is almost the same as the code we had in the previous section, with one important exception: it no longer depends directly on ConfigurationManager. Instead, it depends on the IConfigKeyReader which is injected in the constructor. This reader can be mocked in unit tests.

You’ll also notice that we can now use a single instance of this AppSettingProvider to retrieve all our settings, rather than create a different ConfigKey for each setting. This approach is pretty handy if you’re using an IoC container to inject utility classes into your class constructors.

At this point we can throw away our old ConfigKey class, and instead use the new classes as follows:

Unit tests

Thanks to the separation between reader and provider, it is now easy to unit test our provider code while mocking our reader code. The reader will be source-specific and depends on external factors (e.g. files or databases) so it doesn’t make sense to unit test that. But we can unit test our provider, which handles the conversion and default values, and which will be reused whatever the reader (in fact notice the names used in the code above: AppSettingReader is specific to App.config AppSettings, but ConfigKeyProvider is used for any config key).

In the example unit test below, I’m using Moq to create a mock IConfigKeyReader, and thus test that the provider code works as expected:

For the sake of brevity I won’t include the other unit tests here, but you can find them in the source code accompanying this article.

Database settings

The separation between reader and provider that we achieved in the previous section means that we can reuse the provider code (responsible for conversion and default values) regardless of the source of the settings. This means that anyone can write, for example, a DbSettingReader class which implements IConfigKeyReader and retrieves settings from a database. Its implementation would depend on the database structure so there won’t be any single standard implementation.

However, there is one improvement to our framework that we can make to facilitate reading settings from external sources such as databases. In particular, nowadays it is quite easy to query a database asynchronously without having to block the application. So it makes sense to add support for async methods in our interfaces so that anyone writing a DbSettingReader can then provide an asynchronous implementation.

I opted to move the conversion code to a method shared by the async and non-async methods, and then call separate reader code in them. I intentionally avoided having Get() call GetAsync().Result as it can result in deadlocks.

Technically the best approach would have been to drop the synchronous Get() method altogether and force the use of the asynchronous version. However, I realise there are times when people actually want to call the synchronous version, such as in Console applications or in constructors (although there are workarounds for both – see Async Console Programs and “Can constructors be async?“).

Conclusion and Source Code

This article has presented a simple framework that can be used to read application settings without having to bloat actual program logic. It supports reading AppSettings from an App.config file out of the box, and can easily be extended to support other sources (e.g. databases). It makes it easy to provide default values, works nicely with dependency injection, and can also be used asynchronously.

Check out the source code at the Gigi Labs Bitbucket repository. Feel free to use this code as you like, and let me know if you think it can be improved.